THOUSAND FAMOUS THINGS 229
Columbus Dying
/COLUMBUS perceived that life was about to fail him. He called to
\^j one of liis servants, the last companion of his wanderings, of his
glorjT and his misery, to bring to his bedside a little breviary, the gift
of Pope Alexander at a time when sovereigns treated Mm as a
sovereign. He wrote his will on a page of this book9 to which he
attributed a virtue of divine consecration*
Strange spectacle for his poor servant ! This old man, forsaken
by the world, and stretched upon a pauper's bed in a hired house of
Segovia, gave away in his will seas, hemispheres, islands, continents,
nations, empires !
" I pray my sovereigns and their successors," said he, " to observe
for ever my wishes in the distribution of my rights, my wealth, and
my offices. 1 who, born at Genoa, came to serve them in Castile, and
who discovered in the West the mainland, the islands, and the Indies!
My son shall possess my dignity of Admiral of that part of the ocean
which lies to the west of a line drawn from one pole to the other."
Passing from this point to the distribution of the revenues which had
been secured him by his treaty with Isabella and Ferdinand, the old
man divided, with liberality and wisdom, the millions which ought
to return to his family among his sons and Bartholomew his brother.
He had a thought for that city of Genoa where time had garnered
up his paternal house, but where still remained a far-off kinsmans like
the roots which live in the earth after the tree has been felled. " I
command my son, Diego," he wrote, " to support for ever in the city
of Genoa a member of our family, who shall reside there with his wife
and to assure him an honourable livelihood, as shall become a person
who is allied to us. I wish this kinsman to preserve his footing and
nationality in that city, in the quality of a citizen ; for it is there that
I was born, and it is from thence that I have come."
Columbus, this duty done, surrendered all his thoughts to that God
whom he had always considered as a single and veritable Sovereign, as
if he was lifted up directly by that Providence of which he felt himself to
be the peculiar instrument and minister. Resignation and enthusiasm,
the two supports of his life, did not fail him in his death. He humbled
himself under the hand of nature and rose again under that of God,
which he had always beheld in his triumphs and reverses, and which
he saw more closely at the moment of his departure from earth.
He was wholly lost in penitence for his errors and hope of his two-
fold immortality. A poet at heart, as we see him in his compositions,
he yielded to the sacred poetry of the Psalms the last aspirations of his
soul and the last faint utterances of his lips. He pronounced in Lathi
his farewell of the world, and with a loud voice returned his soul into
the hands of his Creator—a servant satisfied with his work, and
released from the visible world whose boundaries he had enlarged,
to enter the world unseen, and conquer the immeasurable space of
the boundless universe.